January 16, 2004

Snowclones: lexicographical dating to the second

At last a suitable name has been proposed for the
some-assembly-required adaptable cliché frames for lazy
journalists that have received occasional discussion on Language Log
(here,
in the first instance). I mean formulae like these (where the N, X,
Y, Z are filled in to taste):

If Eskimos haveNwords for snow,Xsurely
haveYwords forZ.

In space, no one can hear youX.

Xis the newY.

Glen Whitman,
who discussed this topic on
Agoraphilia,
taking his cue from the first example, proposes calling
these non-sexually reproduced journalistic textual templates by an
appealingly simple name: we can call them snowclones.

Hearing no other nominations, I now hereby propose that they be
so dubbed. The clerk shall enter the new definition into the records.

Since we have a record of the exact time at which Glen hit Send
and transmitted the new term to me (the first person to read it),
lexicographers are in luck here: they can date the coining of snowclone
to the second. So they may like to note for their future reference that
this term was coined at 22:56:57 (that's 3 seconds before 10:57 p.m.) on
Thursday, January 15, 2004, in Northridge, California.

[Update 10/19/2005 (myl) -- some other Language Log posts on Snowclones, added for those who find this via the Wikipedia entry for "snowclone":